Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Zimbio is a cool web 2.0 collaborative media company, that has developed a great tool for promoting your blog. (Full disclosure: Zimbio is a client of my firm, and it's founders are friends of mine. So perhaps I'm a bit biased here, but I'll let you decide after checking out their new feature.)

Generally, Zimbio helps users find relevant information about topics through portals that are created by the users. These can be private or public portals about pretty much any possible topic you can think of. The portal can then be populated with the best resources relevant to the topic. It's different from Wikipedia, which we all know & love, because Zimbio encourages debate and opinion, not just neutral viewpoints.

So, how does this help my blog? Well, to promote your blog, you just need to submit your blog feeds through the "add your blog" link from their homepage. (If you're not already registered, you have to do a quick registration.) Once you've submitted your feeds, portals on the site that have relevance to your blog's content will capture your posts and then link back to your site so people can learn more about you and what you're writing about. This, as you can imagine, has the benefit of improving your Google rankings because whenever your blog post is featured in Zimbio, you'll get a link back to your personal site from Zimbio. Users interested in things you're writing about have also created the portal, so you've got access to another audience for your writings. Note, this also works for podcasts and videoblogs that are distributed via a standard rss feed. (Zimbio plans to add more video and audio features to the site soon.)

Once you've submitted your blog, you can view a list of the portals where your blog posts were promoted in your 'activity log'. You can also easily find other content that might be interesting to you since (at least in theory) you were blogging about it.

Finally, Zimbio has licensed its own content through a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license, and fully respects the licenses for content s that is submitted to the site under any of the CC licenses. (They were also featured last year in this post on CC's blog last August.)

Super cool stuff.